By Malia Mattoch McManus HONOLULU (Reuters) - American survivors of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, many of them in their 90s, will gather on Saturday near Honolulu to mark the anniversary of the attack in 1941 that took the lives of more than two thousand of their peers and thrust the United States into World War Two. Some 50 survivors will take part in the 72nd commemoration of December 7, according to Eileen Martinez, Chief of Interpretation for the USS Arizona Memorial. "This is our most important day at Pearl Harbor." Civilian witnesses from the island of Oahu as well as World War Two veterans and their families will gather at the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center to remember the surprise assault by Japanese air and naval forces that claimed roughly 2,400 American lives. A guided missile destroyer will render honors to the USS Arizona, and a flyover will take place.

An enormous alien planet — one that is 11 times more massive than Jupiter — was discovered in the most distant orbit yet found around a single parent star. The newfound exoplanet, dubbed HD 106906 b, dwarfs any planetary body in the solar system, and circles its star at a distance that is 650 times the average distance between the Earth and the sun. "This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," study lead researcher Vanessa Bailey, a fifth-year graduate student in the University of Arizona's department of astronomy, said in a statement. In the most commonly accepted theories of planet formation, it is thought that planets that orbit close to their parent star, such as Earth, began as small, asteroid-type bodies that clumped together in the primordial disk of gas and dust around the burgeoning star.

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — Herb Weatherwax charms visitors each of the three days a week he volunteers at a memorial for the USS Arizona, a battleship that sank in the 1941 Japanese attack.

PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona commission that oversees workplace safety blamed the state's Forestry Division on Wednesday for the June deaths of 19 firefighters, saying state fire officials knowingly put protection of property ahead of safety and should have pulled crews out earlier.